Lest We Forget!: Another brief reminder of the illegitimacy of “Total Depravity”

It is time for a friendly remind from your sponsor…who is, yours truly.

This Turkey Day, let us not forget the things we are so thankful for. I am thankful for those I have met on my journey of enlightenment over the past couple years or so, on this blog and on others where I can often be found commenting, and gaining a few friends, and pissing off a few others and quite possibly getting expunged from here or there, or teetering on the brink.

Oh well…welcome to the arena of ideas. A bloody place, and sometimes those with the loudest mouths run at first brush with “orthodoxy”, while other stand firm and refuse to stitch the scarlet H (for hypocrite) upon their petticoats and overcoats. For those who stand firm, I write this reminder.

But before I get to that, let us give thanks for “orthodoxy”, and the never-ending source it is to us, never wanting in its provision of ludicrous logic and insane epistemology, debauched understanding, and its constant appeal to untruth as truth. As an ode to the first of Calvin’s evils, let’s us remember why total depravity is so…well, silly.

Total Depravity:

If man is indeed totally depraved then man’s entire epistemology is flawed. Total depravity means that man’s very physical body, down to the physical components that make up his brain and thus his rational faculties, is utterly flawed. The very means by which you apprehend ANYTHING-any idea concerning anything at all-is deemed to be broken. You are always looking through a “lens” of moral corruption and so you have no legitimate, working frame of reference from which to BEGIN to observe anything, and then of course from that, to form any understanding of it.

If this is true, then man is completely unable to recognize any truth at all. Which means that man can never KNOW anything. Man’s entire epistemology is determined purely by his “depravity”, which remains nothing more but an unknowable, unobservable, all-determining force which compels him forward through his blind existence. Thus, the very idea of “total depravity” must completely remove man from himself and God by removing from him any ability to apprehend reality. Again, ALL man perceives is seen through the lens of moral corruption.

Of course, this precludes ANYONE from declaring ANY truth, even “Jesus is the way to Salvation”. If your entire epistemology is flawed,then how do you know ANYTHING, much less that “Jesus is Lord”?

Total Depravity is not only unbiblical (the term does not exist in Scripture), but it also cannot be rationally defended. It, like any form of determinism, makes it impossible for man to know anything, and therefore, if one believes in total depravity, he cannot, according to his own “logic”, actually argue that it is true. The DEATH of truth is a direct consequence of such a doctrine.